ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some examples of dream interpretation as it is carried out in psychotherapy. Most dreams have a huge amount of material condensed in them, including the primary psychological concerns of the dreamer, facts of the dreamer's life history, and feelings of the dreamer toward other people. An exhaustive analysis of a dream is very useful as an exercise for training the psychotherapist. As in most psychoanalyses, verbal interpretations, however precise and correct, can be relatively ineffective; real, substantial change occurs only when the patient experiences the psychological issues, in the relationship with the therapist, in a vivid and emotional way. There are many ways of working with dreams that depart from the model of dream-telling, associations, and interpretation. The patient's dream clarifies the analyst's counter-transference biases and blind spots, and this then leads to the analyst being more effective in clarifying the patient's transference and resistance.
